Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 168: Thu Jun 20

Eva (Losey, 1962): Cinema Museum, 7pm


Cinema Museum introduction:
Wonder Reels return to the Cinema Museum with their unique events featuring live performances from outstanding London musicians followed by a 35mm screening of a full feature film chosen with the artist in mind. The event will start with British-Italian producer Nathalia Bruno, who will be playing one of her haunting experimental art pop sets as DRIFT. The concert will be followed by a 35mm projection of Joseph Losey’s 1962 Eva, in which Jeanne Moreau appears as the ultimate femme fatale wandering through the ghostly streets of Venice. Doors open at 18.30, live performance from 19.00, film from 20.00.

Time Out review:
The film is set in Venice, in the season that most suits that city (winter), shot in Jospeh Losey's characteristic baroque style of the period, and features Stanley Baker as the upstart Welsh novelist, engaged to an empty marriage but gradually ensnared into an amour fou by the ferocious, loose temptress Eve. Love hardly enters into it; it is corruption by power, money and bad faith that are Losey's obsessions, and they are dwelt upon insistently with more sheerly scathing disaste than he allowed himself subsequently. The film undoubtedly belongs to Jeanne Moreau who, in one of her finest performances, gives a portrait of terrifying honesty - the heartless self-possession of a woman who does nothing unless for money or whim. The figures of alienation wandering through an elegant landscape may be familiar from the Antonioni trilogy of the period, but the pessimism, energetic misanthropy and disenchantment with the world are all Losey's own.
Chris Peachment

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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